home

Tomorrow, early, we take off for Port Townsend to take possession of our new home. In addition to being excited, I'm worried, tense, happy, giddy, confused, sad - okay, just name an emotion. I'm feeling it.

When we came here, it was my dream to make "home," the place that I missed after moving out of the house I grew up in. After a dozen years in Illinois, I was hoping for some reprise of my youth, not for myself, but for the entity I call my family. The place where unfathomably, two adults and 4 children lived in a three-bedroom home, took all our meals together, and watched television programs together at night. Where we shared chores and fights and phone calls from boyfriends and prom nights, graduations and holidays, hams and turkeys and grilled meals in winter, varsity games, mumps, hurricanes and above all, raucous laughter from time to time. The place that I can barely remember, but on those rare occasions when I do, my heart is filled with peace and longing at the same time.

We siblings grew up and a little apart, going our separate ways and keeping as close touch with our parents as we were individually comfortable. Holidays became chores, gathering difficult, and not only because Dad was gone, or because Mom was unable to enjoy herself in the midst of the chaos that grandchildren and adult reprobates brought. It seems that for a lot of years, family became superfluous. I wanted it back. And so I manifested this large home, with this amazing pool and decks, space galore for playing or relaxing, room for sleepovers. A play house, a vacation home, or just a place that my sisters and brother and mother could come and not worry, not be anxious about spilled drinks or not enough chairs. After one Thanksgiving here, my mother acknowledged me to be the "hostess with the mostest" marveling at how relaxed I was with a house full of insanity; and later, after another Thanksgiving, she called me "the matriarch" of the family.

That wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but that's what I got. The matriarch. Keeper of the hearth, keeper of the family. The place where the boys could come on snow days, where for the first time in more than a decade and for probably the last time, my entire family spent a holiday together. The place where my big sister, after a long week of work, could come with her children and enjoy an evening's swim. The place where my little sister could stay comfortably and visit everyone else when she came into town from Massachusetts. The place where lunch was served after Mom's funeral. The place, home, the hearth. Here.

My sisters are sad about our move. Terry because she feels rather isolated, living as close as she does to our brother but having no real relationship with him. Nancy because I'm taking away that notion of home she's come to substitute for Mom and Dad's house, and removing the ease of family gatherings. And for those same reasons I'm really sad, too. I would love to have that same childhood cameraderie with my sisters (minus the bickering and occasional fisticuffs), the familiarity that only comes with proximity. Heck, there's no place for me to stay when I come back to visit.

I'll talk with my sisters, and probably my brother, at least as often as I do now. That won't change. I can't imagine how often I'll see them, but that's no different than in the years we lived in Illinois. My conflict is that my heart still yearns for family at the same time as it yearns for the life that hobbitt and I envision for ourselves. This move will be hard. It's not about the house, which I loved from the first moment I set eyes upon it. It's about something intangible and perhaps even impossible, or nonexistent.

When I think about being able to see snow-capped jagged peaks shrouded in morning mist, and open water, whether bay or strait, I am filled with happy excitement. I know the place I'm going to is filled with the spirit of "my people," a phrase I first uttered during a ferry trip through the San Juan Islands. I can't explain what I mean by "my people" except to say it has nothing to do with humankind. There is something in the spirit of the mountains and water that called to me - no, positively shouted out to me - and that I would be foolish to resist. I'm going home. I'm sure of that. It's hard to explain all this sadness, then, to hobbitt, who has never had roots in the soil longer than the 10 years we lived together in our last house. He's not attached to family or place. I have roots in every place I've ever lived, though that's not the same as attachments.

I hope that this time, when my foundation gets pulled up once again, the wound eventually gives way to stronger, wiser, quieter new roots.